Music of the Ghosts: A Novel

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, and in those four years, Pol Pot and his regime caused the deaths of an estimated 2 million people — a full quarter of the country’s population at the time. The depth of the genocide ensured that no Cambodian evaded its impact — the entire country suffered enormous trauma; those who lived share levels of personal tragedy that would be considered extraordinary in most places, at most times.

Vaddey Ratner is one of these survivors. She left Cambodia as a child — she and her mother were refugees to the States, the rest of their large extended family unaccounted for, including her father, who had long since disappeared. In Music of the Ghosts (Touchstone, 336 pp., *** out of four stars), her follow-up to her best-selling debut In the Shadow of the Banyan, Ratner presents a sensitive, melancholy portrait of the inheritance of survival — the loss and the pain, as well as the healing.

The book takes place in 2003, more than 20 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge-controlled Democratic Kampuchea. Suteera, or Teera, Aung was 13 in 1979 when she escaped Cambodia with her aunt Amara, her only remaining family member. Now an adult and an American, she flies to Cambodia after receiving a letter from a man calling himself “the Old Musician at Nagara Temple,” who claims to have known her father in prison during the last year of Pol Pot’s regime.

It’s Teera's first trip back to Cambodia, and she embarks with complicated feelings, unsure of what to expect from this homecoming to a place she hardly recognizes as home: “[T]he destruction, the killing, and all that was lost — she does not, will not, associate with her small private Cambodia. That was Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. Her country disappeared with her family.”

What she finds is a country of survivors: in some cases physically marred; in all cases plagued with grief and longing. The Old Musician, a one-time revolutionary later imprisoned and tortured by the regime he once believed in, is one of many Cambodians haunted by guilt — “He sees his culpability in everything.” His connection to the Aungs is tangled and loaded. Slowly, painfully, he and Teera relive and unravel this history together.

Author Vaddey Ratner.(Photo: Kristina Sherk)

The novel throbs with heartache, as well as with frank descriptions of cruelty and misery. It’s a harrowing, personal portrayal of a dark stain on modern history, one in which Americans played a significant part: The Khmer Rouge came into power after a campaign of U.S. bombings in Cambodia targeting Vietnamese Communist forces.

The pace is plodding at times, and there are some stumbles in the prose, which strives for a musicality Ratner doesn’t quite pull off. (“He’s often surprised that he can still feel with these digits (fingers), as if the injuries they sustained decades ago heighten their wariness of contact, sabotage.”)

But despite its faults, Music of the Ghosts is an affecting novel, filled with sorrow and a tender, poignant optimism. In their clumsy, roaming way, these characters search for answers and find each other; they reconstruct and rebuild and continue to survive.